My LifeByDesign360 Gift – and Thoughts for You and Your Life

Welcome to Life by Design 360, Thoroughly Business, Thursday edition. Today I’m going to take a little bit different course. Today I’m going to share with you a story about how a continuity model actually changed my life and my businesses forever.

I also want to give you a gift. You see, the thing is when I got out of college and went into mortgage banking for about nine years, it was full of ups and downs and actually every single time that I did a business deal, closed a loan for somebody or when I was managing the different offices, um, that was it. I mean, we were always on the hunt.

And it was when interest rates went up tremendously and actually my income got cut off and I went from doing really well to really horribly that my life shifted amazingly and very, very fast. During that period of time, a financial advisor came to me and said, you know, what you’re doing, everything you’re supposed to be doing. This is before things got bad.

And she said, you know, the only thing I can really offer you is, is a job. And at the time I didn’t want it. But later on, when things got bad in the mortgage industry, I thought, you know what? I really like financial planning.

I like helping people. Maybe I want to do that. And then I did, and my life changed forever.

The coolest part about owning this type of business is that because of the dependability of income, you can share as much time and have a better life with your family, with your spouse, your children, and you have a better ability to give back to the community that you serve. Every year. Now we have a really great party where we celebrate financial freedom for the clients and members that I serve.

It’s all about financial freedom, everything. We also have a year-end special where we talk about what happened throughout the year for our clients, members we work with, as well as what we see that’s going on for the next year. I always wind it up with a special holiday story.

It’s filled with great food and really fun gifts. It’s one of the ways that I give back to the clients and members that we take care of. And it’s really, really fun.

Personally, I get more of a charge from doing those special events than just about anything else I do. There’s also, like I said, the ability to spend quality time with my spouse and my kids and the rest of my family based upon my schedule, which I’m usually very generous to myself at this time of year. And you can design that too.

I also get to give back freely to the community through charity and community service. I’m not tied to a work schedule that somebody else tells me I’ve got to do. The truth is I really love what I do and the people that we serve and that motivates me to do more every day.

I command my own business. I command my own life. I work as much or as little as I want to.

And the truth is I work a lot because I enjoy it. It’s, it’s actually my hobby, my fun thing to do. I love putting this stuff together.

 

If you’re in a business that you don’t like or you work for somebody that you don’t enjoy working with, or it’s a toxic environment, you should leave it immediately. And if you can’t leave it immediately, then you should chart a course out of what you’re doing and reset a course for something that you truly love. When I went into investments and financial planning, that was and still is something that I truly love and I’m passionate about.

What I didn’t understand quite honestly is that most people really hate doing this stuff. I love doing it for myself as well as for the other people that I, that I work with. It’s truly fulfilling.

In designing your own life, ask yourself, what expertise is it that I have that I truly enjoy doing and that I can use to help other people? Then quite simply, just ask people if that’s something that they’d be interested in. And if they are, then do it. When I learned about memberships and subscription-oriented businesses and how to create them for my mentors, personally, I couldn’t believe that I had overlooked this for so many years.

There were certainly so many other situations and opportunities I had where I could have taken other memberships and subscription opportunities to the next level. But instead, I would rather help you to build the type of membership or subscription-oriented business based upon what your expertise is and what you really love to do so that you can have the type of life that most others only dream of. Help you to set up a course to provide for others in a way which is beyond your wildest imagination.

This also gives you the ability to give back to them in ways you’d never ever even dreamed of. Further, if you really wanted to, you could actually create an exceptional business and an income and wealth. You might even be able to create a foundation which lives on forever and continuously takes care of people on an ongoing basis based upon your values.

You really have the ability to truly change the world and that’s not something that everyone can say. It’s powerful and it’s truly awesome. So for this season, I wanted to give you the gift of imagination.

 

Imagine that you can truly do for yourself in this world. Imagine what you could truly do for yourself in this world if you took your life to the next level. What you could do for others by taking their life to the next level and what you could do for this world based upon your knowledge, expertise, insights, creativity, and your care.

This isn’t a gift that you can wrap up, but it’s the type of gift that you can give this world for eternity. And it’s the type of gift that keeps sharing and it’s the type of gift that keeps sharing no matter what. This is Doug Reed signing off for today and wishing you a very, very special holiday season this year and every year.

Take care everybody. We’ll see you soon.